


The Relationship Landscape

by AstaianNymph



Category: The Avengers (Marvel Movies)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, M/M, TED Talk, Unconventional Relationship, d/s verse
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-02-10
Updated: 2014-02-10
Packaged: 2018-01-11 19:33:29
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,861
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1177043
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/AstaianNymph/pseuds/AstaianNymph
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Bruce falls in love with Loki, who has decided to take over the world in a different way. The problem? They're both doms. Somehow they make it work, and due to his journey, Bruce is asked to give a TED talk. This is that talk. Bruce is still the Hulk and Loki is still Loki, but clearly he's not going to say that to a TED audience, so he's put a little bit of a spin on things.</p>
            </blockquote>





	The Relationship Landscape

**Author's Note:**

> This was written for [this kinkmeme prompt](http://avengerkink.livejournal.com/18271.html?thread=41924447#t41924447). I started writing a more personal story, but got stuck after a few pages. Hopefully I'll be able to finish that later and make this into a series.

Bruce Banner has mapped out the relationship landscape of his adopted country—France. He has something important to tell us about the conversations we have around doms, switches, and subs. He uses his experience to hopefully jump-start a new conversation about non-standard relationships.

Begin transcript:

I'm a physicist. I like simple. Once a molecule gets above 20 or 30 atoms I get very confused. But life is not very simple. Saying that can get difficult because while we all agree it's the truth, it's also hard to pin down. What does it mean? Maybe I can take you on a tour of my life to help figure it out.

Many people's lives have been battered about by chance, and mine is no different. I was a biochemistry major as an undergrad. Unluckily for me, undergraduates usually involve larger molecules. This is how I found my love of physics my senior year. So I explored the field, and when I graduated I went into a graduate program in nuclear physics. I learned French to collaborate with a program at the University of Paris on my dissertation as a gesture of goodwill, even though they all speak English. 

After getting my doctorate, I worked at a military lab. Unfortunately while I was working there, there was an accident. I was offered a temporary post at another one of their labs until our building was rebuilt, but I was having a crisis of character, and so I said I'd take a leave of absence and do some community service while they were rebuilding. They happily agreed to this, so off I went to India.

In India, I volunteered with Médecins Sans Frontières, also known as Doctors Without Borders. I got a crash course in field medicine. in the different conditions that we were going to face. Half of the job was basic first aid and hygiene. The other half was learning how to figure out who I could help, who needed a referral for one of our doctors, and who needed to be seen as soon as possible. After my training, I was released on my own, and assigned a circuit to travel. I'd spend between a few hours and a day and a half in the villages that were on my circuit. I didn't work in cities, because there were different teams there. I walked, I hitch-hiked, and I rode bicycles, pack animals, and motorcycles. All this carrying medicine, first aid supplies, and my trusty shortwave radio. One circuit  usually took me two months.

After a year and a half I got word that my facility had been rebuilt. And I wanted to go back because I am passionate about physics, but I couldn't just yet. And I didn't know why, but I felt I needed to help the people around me more. In a way, I owed these people a debt. I loved working with them, and it was in India that I first really learned how to interact with people. That was something I had trouble with before. I had a somewhat serious girlfriend for awhile in grad school, but I have no idea looking back how we lasted as long as we did.

So I stayed on with MSF. I was transferred to working in Kolkata. I would work anywhere in the city that needed me, but my home base was in the slums because that was where I was needed. And while I had known the communities on the circuit, it was different here. Here, I was a part of it. I lived with them and I saw the same people regularly. And as I did, I was able to learn about people's stories in a better way.

I was opened up to a world of nuance like I never had been before. I talked to men and women, doms and subs and switches from all walks of life. And what they had to say was mind-boggling to me. They paired themselves up in ways I had never heard of. I found subs marrying subs and opening their own small businesses. I found men making homes together, as well as women and switch-dom relationships, and I didn't know what to make of it. Eventually what I came up with was that Indian culture is just different from the West. Coming across all these relationships that I had never seen or heard of in Ohio, where people were normal. I knew there were some non-standard relationships that occurred in New York City, but I also heard that New York was a den of immorality. So I came to accept that people could have non-standard relationships, but I still didn't believe that as a westerner, I would ever encounter that in the West.

Something intensely personal had to happen for me to wake up. And that was that I fell in love. There was a delegation of politicians from France visiting people at MSF. They shadowed me for three days, learning about my work. And it took me all of three days to fall in love. Well, maybe I wasn't all the way in love, but I was well on my way. It was enough that we kept in touch. It was enough that he visited me regularly. And when the year was up, after working for MSF for three years, I moved to Nantes, France, where my boyfriend was the mayor, taking up a position at the local university.

Why is this a big deal? Well two reasons. The first was that he is a politician, and that is a strange world for me. It is way more complicated than nuclear physics. The second, and more important reason is that we are both doms. I thought he was a switch for a little bit, and he thought the same of me, but that illusion faded well before I moved to France. That left us with the question of what to do when two doms fall in love. Conventional western wisdom says it's not possible. But that's just not true.

We had a rough few years when we started out. With us both needing to be in control, we had to figure out how to stop being in control sometimes. If you think watching two doms fighting over a sub is bad, you've never seen two doms in love fighting about anything. We had a few knock-down, drag-out fights before we had to adjust our expectations. We had to be exceptionally clear about when one of us was taking the role of dom, and when we had to get into a mindset similar to that of two business partners who are both doms.

We also had to figure out how to deal with our public image. Being in love with a politician means that your life is hyper-examined. That was a big worry for me for awhile. I was relatively out of the spotlight, but after we decided to get engaged, that was no longer the case. But it became less of an issue when I found that I was completely lost in the realm of politic, and letting him take the traditional dom position only irritated me sometimes. But you make these concessions when you're in love.

As time passed, I started to become curious. As a researcher at a university, I had access to journals in psychology, sociology, and anthropology. And nowhere could I find substantial research on non-standard relationships. For some reason, I thought I just wasn't looking in the right places, so I asked my colleague. And she did her own investigation and couldn't find anything either.

Now I know I'm a physicist by training, but I do know how to ask questions. I worked alongside Dr. Anne Tremont to create a survey which we administered to a representational proportion of the population of France. And it turns out that we got quite staggering results. About fifteen percent of French relationships are either dom-dom or sub-sub. Another quarter are dom-switch or sub-switch relationships, which the literature refers to as quasi-standard, or "standard but not ideal". This was an amazing finding, but that's not the half of it.

We followed up with the respondents who were in the quasi-standard and non-standard relationships and  we talked with them. We held as many interviews as we could manage. And of these, the response was amazing. We learned all about the challenges that people were facing. By the end of the study, we hadn't done any legal research, but we had heard about all of the legal problems these relationships faced. There is good news here. Most of the problems that face non-standard and quasi-standard couples are not true legal problems. We found that 92% were either problems allowed through religious organisations at religious institutions or simply social prejudices. The bad news is that there are a lot of social prejudices. In fact, we found that four percent of the total problems were not legal problems, but public officials thought they were, and discriminated on that basis.

We also asked these people how they thought we could solve the issue of discrimination. Some people did point out the need to abolish the discriminatory laws, but I was surprised by the number one answer to the question. Eight-six percent of the people we interviewed said that if people talked about non-standard relationships, they thought things would iron themselves out, that people would see that this is normal.

So we asked how they envisioned a discussion getting started. One popular answer was that schools should teach about quasi-standard and non-standard relationships alongside standard ones. Another popular answer was that films and TV shows should feature more quasi- and non- standard relationships. The third incredibly popular answer was that someone famous should come out and talk about their experience.

I like these answers. These are simple answers, and as I'm still doing work in physics alongside being Dr. Tremont's helper, I still really appreciate simple. So, we talked to the Cannes Film Festival and asked them to do their best to find a film to include that featured a non-standard or quasi-standard relationship. Which is why last year for the first time, they featured a film where the lead characters were two subs who were married even though the film was not centred on their relationship.

At the same time, Dr. Tremont collaborated with lead educators in the France to  create a training that helps teachers work non-standard and quasi-standard relationships into the existing sex education curriculum. This has been integrated into some classrooms already.

So that's two out of three checked off. Sure, there's still work to do, but we're slowly getting a conversation going. But we haven't managed to implement all three of our catalysts. So I'm taking the initiative on that one. I am Dr. Bruce Banner, and on 29 May 2013, I married my partner of nine years and fellow dom Luca Delaufey, the Prime Minister of France.

[applause]

Thank you. Now we've checked off all three of our catalysts. I have finally accepted life will never be as simple as I wish it were. Now let's have a conversation.


End file.
